[NOTE:
My Be Still and Know exercise is an antidote to the sort of pressured
learning discussed in this article. See the very end of this article for
information.]

“Of
every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that
thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” —Genesis
2:16-17

There
are rapists who are psychopathic enough to feel that their victims benefit
from being violated.

But
sexual rape is not the only kind there is; one can rape the soul, mind
and body with religion, education and with drugs. Likewise, rape is not
always forced and violent. Seduction is also rape, whereby through deception
you find in yourself what is not supposed to be there.

There
are classes of social psychopaths who, like the sex rapist, feel that
they are doing you a service when they violate you with education, religion,
politics and medicine.

The
“benefit” of rape, whether by seduction or by sudden violent
pressure, is the special creation of a new identity and reality for the
victim. For, once violated, the victim tends to cling to vile rapists
of all kinds for reassurance through escape and for identity reinforcement
(in the same moment of escape). Psychopaths pride themselves in being
creators of sick realities for sick personalities (all the while pretending
to enrich your life).

Afraid
of truth, all psychotic victims are indeed fascinated with the reassurances
of evil. Being drawn hypnotically toward the familiar spirit makes them
its legal prey; a bad conscience makes every temptation attractive. Victims
are drawn like moths to a candle because the violently implanted identity
craves the comfort of the rapist “parent” that gave it life.
Seeking refuge from one psychopath, you become involved with others. Unless
you find something called understanding, there is no salvation, no escape
from wicked-shepherd, letter-of-the-law authorities.

The
syndrome is something like having a fight with a woman and making up in
bed. Any violation through violence, pressure or tease has a way of making
itself familiar. Being raped is like undergoing psychic judo—you
trip, you fall, you cling to what tripped you because that’s all
there is left to give you support, and you fall harder.

Would
you believe it—if you were violated by fire, you would find ordeal-by-fire
attractive and you would seek fulfillment by fire? Psychopaths know this
principle well.

Do you
know what welders often do when they get burned? They put the torch close
to the burn for comfort. They call that pulling the heat out of the burn.
Would you do that sort of thing if you were burned? Some people would,
and the reason why has something to do with the way they react, with whether
or not they were violated by the experience.

Now
this principle applies to everything in life, especially education. Are
you going to learn in such a way that you lose yourself in what you are
doing so much that it becomes you and cries out for the “rapist”?

Some
rapists are psychopaths, others are psychotic puppets carrying out programmed
“orders,” compulsively acting out a dream and dramatizing
the character of their models. In a manner of speaking, they kill because
the captain ordered the sergeant to order the soldier, and the soldier
cannot refuse. Amazing how one man—the general—can move an
entire army to its death, and the whole army cannot oppose the general.

When
we are violated, that which disturbed us becomes the basis, the foundation,
of what we are and what we are going to be. And no matter how vile that
potential is, it is all we have. To lose the assurances of our corrupter/model
seems like ceasing to exist. The baring of the guilt-stained soul to the
light is more torture than we can bear. If sinning and killing pleases
our master, then we kill for the relief of his embrace.

Like
Chinese communists who brainwashed people by making them study Mao Tse-tung’s
book, so do false religions and false education create a robot-elite by
forced study. From six to eighteen years of age, children are required
to sit six hours a day listening to some impatient bore instead of being
outside, learning and playing through experience and curiosity. No wonder
our children are mad, bad and sick.

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Since
time immemorial it has been said that knowledge opens new worlds. We are
persuaded or forced (for our own “good”) to learn everything
we can because knowledge is supposed to liberate the mind. That concept
is certainly very appealing, for it is almost perfectly true—but
not quite true, because, in fact, only the truth can set you free. Pridefully
acquired knowledge merely liberates the soul from understanding.

But
surely truth and factual knowledge are the same, aren’t they? The
answer is that although they should complement one another, they can,
through seduction and pressure, become separated and lead in opposite
directions. People can learn themselves away from understanding.

Haven’t
you heard the old saying, “all knowledge and no common sense”?
Knowledge minus understanding is prideful, hypnotic and traumatic. However,
knowledge can lead to awakening and to understanding, and when it does,
knowledge ceases.

When
knowledge leads you up to understanding and is no more, understanding
takes over, replacing the dependency upon knowledge with the wholesome
dependency upon self-understanding. Since it involves growing through
discovery, understanding sets you free from knowledge and from the need
to memorize; it delivers you from dusty old teachers and books. It is
precisely for this reason that understanding threatens authorities; this
is why they selfishly force you to learn.

If everyone
had understanding, who would need authorities? Who would need problem
solvers if we could solve our own problems? Psychopaths perpetuate their
leadership by leading you away from understanding.

When
knowledge can be held out to appear greater than understanding, then he
who tempts through knowledge leads with knowledge. And so, as victims
in bondage through knowledge, we are set apart from the understanding
of how we have been tricked and what has gone wrong with our lives.

And
by way of the tree of knowledge, here we are, lost in the learning trap,
bewildered and confused. And now all that rises to solve the problems
caused by being lost in knowledge is more knowledge, and more bondage
to the serpent of knowledge. And so we sink in a mire of despair.

Are
you beginning to understand the appeal of knowledge to your ego and its
power over you?

If you
are forced or coerced to study or concentrate too hard, too long, on anything,
good or bad, your attention becomes so involved, so lost, so hypnotized,
that it can’t get back to where it was. Because of the terrible
errors of judgment made under that spell, you may be unable, even afraid,
to come back to the reality from whence you fell. A variation of this
same principle lies behind every pleasure of sin. False security and relief
from guilt come from being more completely involved with whatever or whoever
holds your attention ever more perfectly. And this is especially true
with study—you can temporarily relieve the inferiority from the
guilt of study by studying ever harder.

Whether
you realize it or not, concentration is not a way of improving yourself;
it is a way of giving up your soul to attain some imagined ego-objective.
Fascination is the second stage of concentration. Here your ego becomes
relieved of the guilt of achieving through being more and more completely
captivated by ideas and concepts. To capture anyone’s soul, then,
you must get him to try, will and want, and then you can trap him through
his imagination. (Another form of this is to encourage egos to imagine
“creatively”—later to fantasize and to escape.) Now
if you try hard to do something, the same thing happens. When you realize
the truth about trying, you might try not to try, but that is still trying.
Trying to solve your problem by trying causes more anxiety about the problem
because will is still involved.

The
razor’s-edge difference between knowledge and deep understanding
is the difference between doing it the easy or the hard way, and between
life and death.

To seek
to know oneself as God amid the knowledge of one’s own mind happens
to be the original sin. Permit me now to lay bare the subtle terror which
lurks behind book-learning as opposed to understanding for yourself.

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There
is a killer system in this world, the sole purpose of which is to trick
you into being proud in order to capture you through knowledge—and
defeat your unfoldment through understanding. The serpent of the knowledge
tree is still around, enticing us toward glory through knowledge, mocking
our innocence. The parasitical human agencies who subscribe willfully
to that system are programmed to destroy your understanding for the sake
of their power over you. They will try their damnedest to displace the
spirit of the word (understanding) which leads toward life, with the letter
of the word (the spirit behind knowledge) which leads to death. Having
been converted, you too will begin to reflect, cling to and serve the
serpent spirit of the dry-knowledge system.

Without
realizing the danger, and thinking it to be advantageous, vast numbers
of people revel in corruption by opening wide their mouths and allowing
religion to be shoved down their throats. The reason is that, once separated
from an intuitive source of knowing and being, the vain and the fallen
crave knowledge to distract and to fill the void of their souls; it is
their way of forgetting to realize. The spirit that rises to “save”
you with knowledge is always that which felled you with knowledge.

Knowledge,
then, begins to substitute for understanding and facts become imaginary
name-things into which you can escape from understanding. You forget (guilt)
in one way by remembering in another. To involve your willful self in
thinking and in worry provides relief from truth as well as renewed hope
for the forbidden things of glory and power.

To think
hard about anything provides an almost perfect escape from realizing its
deeper meaning. It is easy to fool ourselves into believing that we are
seeking truth when we look to knowledge for truth, because just as the
appeal of knowledge can lead astray, so can more of it lead you from realizing
the sin of it. And that is just as true of knowledge about good things
as it is of the knowledge of evil.

With
the fall to knowledge comes the guilt of pride, and the guilty nature,
retreating from understanding which exposes guilt, finds refuge in more
knowledge, excuses, rationale, verses and chapters, and educational escapism.

In all
psychotic positive-thinking/learning episodes, knowledge similar to understanding
rises in the mind in such a way that it seems to originate from within.
Knowledge enveloping your soul in this way makes your ego feel as if it
were the divine source of truth. The kind of knowledge that lends itself
to getting lost in makes you “high.” But no matter whether
it is emotionally or intellectually induced, any high becomes the next
low, attended by more guilt.

With
knowledge comes guilt; through understanding comes innocence.

Guilt
and inferiority are caused by the conflict between what we have become
through knowledge and what we might have become through understanding.
Alas, through ambition or weakness we have become prisoners of the spirit
behind knowledge and we can’t (or won’t) get back by struggling
against it improperly, i.e., with resentment.

Knowledge,
which causes sin when we use it to build our ego, then appears in different
guises as if to save us from sin. Without the benefit of understanding,
our feelings of emptiness and inadequacy get twisted around and interpreted
to mean that our solution lies in more knowledge. You can be intimidated
into thinking that you don’t know enough, and tricked into wanting
to be with people who are supposed to know. We look to accomplished, lettered
men of science and religion to save us. And that is the knowledge trap.

Even
when you are “into” sound philosophic truths, you are rarely
threatened by what such lofty words mean. The excitement of learning tends
to draw the ego deeper into a psychotic sleep that prevents the awakening
to meaning; instead, we awaken in a dream universe amid comforting, lofty
word-things. So it comes to pass that we can know truth egotistically,
without really realizing or being intimate with truth at all. All we have
are noises and image-things in our heads which are real to us, memories
that one day fall apart at the grave, laying bare the evil spirit of knowledge
behind them.

Before
I go on, allow me to run through the principle of evolutionary compensation
through knowledge once more.

Any
excitement or pressure creates a psychotic, emotional state of involvement
with the intelligence behind that pressure which frees the prideful soul
from reality to evolve physically and spiritually separate from God, with
an earthy, independent ego-life and mortal selfhood. Through the challenges
and problems caused by self-seeking through knowledge, a false, selfish
type of concern and cunning evolves which passes for goodness and intelligence.
As in all psychotic episodes, the soul eludes its guilt amid evolving
knowledge-answers. We don’t want simple answers; we need complexity
to maintain our pride.

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The
illusion of progress is almost perfect, except that every upset or shock
which evolves an answer also produces greater problems. Eventually, when
our own systems fail miserably, we substitute other people’s knowledge-answers.
But what really is the basic nature of any ego-answer? It is always a
more complete involvement with mind (through emotion), aiming for grandeur
(at best), but settling for “innocence” (at least). If we
can’t be great ourselves, we can at least be grateful to those who
help ease our guilt. For part two click below.

[NOTE:
The antidote to becoming or remaining entangled with unhealthy knowledge
is learning to deal properly, i.e., without resentment, to pressure
of any kind. My Be Still and Know audio exercise shows you how to do this
and helps you practice remaining in the proper state. You can listen
to it free and, if you like it, purchase your own copy, at fhu.com
or by calling 800-877-3227.]

Roy Masters—who
in his 80s continues to broadcast the longest-running counseling show
in talk radio history, his internationally syndicated daily radio program
Advice
Line, grew up in pre-WWII England. He started his journey toward
understanding human nature when as a teen he saw a stage hypnotist at
a vaudeville show in Brighton. The hypnotist easily put volunteer subjects
in a spell and made them do outlandish things, like dancing with a broom
and forgetting their own names.

Puzzled by the
hypnotist’s mysterious power, Roy distinctly remembers pondering
the question: “Why can’t hypnotism be used to make people
act sensibly, rather than foolishly?” Inspired by the idea of
harnessing this baffling force for good, he later pursued the art of
hypnotism and established a successful hypnotherapy practice.

After several years
of practice, Masters made his central and pivotal discovery about the
root of people’s emotional problems, addictions and complexes.
He realized that people did not need hypnosis, because their core problem
was that they are already hypnotized—not by a clever stage performer,
but by the stresses, pressures and seductions of daily life.

He used his knowledge
to discover a way to help us become de-hypnotized, and discovered that
the root of the power of negative suggestion lay in our wrong emotional
response, that of resentment. Masters’ remarkably effective exercise,
a simple observation technique called Be Still and Know—is at
the core of his unmatched track record in helping people overcome even
the most serious mental-emotional problems, and is the centerpiece of
a successful program within the U.S. military community (“Patriot
Outreach”) that is helping thousands of military personnel
and their families cope with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).